大象传媒

I鈥檓 writing this on behalf of my father who was called up in 1940 and served throughout the war spending over 2-years in North Africa, Italy and Palestine before his first home leave! My father also named Fred Marshall was 36 when he was conscripted into the Royal Artillery and shipped out to North Africa as a corporal (a lucky posting, as all his younger, single compatriots were sent to the Hong Kong and Singapore where they were caught up in the defeat by the Japanese army). Arriving at Alexandria he was posted to a heavy anti-aircraft battery supporting the 8th Army in its desert campaigns against Rommell鈥檚 Africa Korp. He spoke of cameo stories that are insignificant in the greater picture but are both amusing and touching on an individual basis.

His unit had been camped in a desert location for about 7-days. The site had been used by both sides in the movement to and fro across the desert. One day my father heard an explosion near his tent and found that a colleague had stepped on a personnel mine resulting in the loss of his right foot. The mine was clearly an old one that had been left from an earlier conflict but what caused much debate was that it was located right along the path taken by my father and other troops as they moved to and from their tents and yet everyone had stepped over it until this unlucky soldier on this particular day.

The unit was camped on high ground with all the tents neatly aligned along the ridge adjacent to the guns. A flight of Stuka bombers appeared and in typical steep dives bombed and strafed the unit. My father sheltered in a shallow trench and watched as a line of cannon shells approached the trench one shell imbedding itself in the wall of the trench a matter of inches from his head. My father watched as tracers from a Bren gun tracked and then shot down one of the Stukas. When the attack was over it was noted that a single cannon shell hole had passed through the roof of each tent - fortunately no one had been in the tents. My father retrieved the cannon shell from the trench wall and it is still in my possession.

At quiet points in the campaign the armourer would often make a 鈥渇ew bob鈥� by making souvenirs. This consisted of unscrewing the base of a grenade and draining out the gunpowder then mounting the grenade on to the base of a shell casing that had been cut down 鈥� so creating rather smart brass ash trays. Needless to say no one was very keen to hang around while the work was done as any grain of gunpowder trapped in the thread of the grenade could easily have caused it to explode during the delicate job of defusing it.

Although deaths occurred frequently it was often the accidental fatalities that caused most heart ache. When the unit transferred to Italy they were involved in a night time convoy of trucks and towed guns. A well liked young man in the unit was acting as messenger, riding a motorbike along the convoy often he would have to tuck in between lorries as traffic sped past in the other direction. It was bad luck when in such an incident the convoy decelerated just as the motorcyclist pulled in to avoid on coming traffic, with hooded headlights and tired drivers no one saw the motorcyclist and he was killed crushed between two of the lorries. It took the unit sometime to get over the event.

Ordinary people coping with extraordinary events 鈥� proud of them? Oh yes!

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